(12.03.06) Anders Peterson offers an interesting take on the dark ambient genre with Her Face Among The Shadows, an Objekt4 release on the Czechoslovakian label, Ravenheart. Peterson takes equal parts Cold Meat Industry-style fascination with haunted factories and Eno-esque washes of ambient drift to make a record that certainly isn’t cheery in its ambient texture, but it isn’t filled with oppressive darkness either.
“Seclusion” shuffles along like a insomniac monk with bells and chimes in his pockets. In the cold stone hallways, the echo of his sandals is a shuffling rhythm, and the minute clatter of the metal in his pockets is both cacophonous and phantasmal. “Among the Shadows” wanders down a dark path, one very much haunted by the sort of insane asylum ghosts you’d find on a Atrium Carceri or a Lithivm record, complete with spectral winds, rattling chains and ominous gusts of sound that can’t be the sound of anything friendly. “Her Face” strays into the light, adopting a downtempo beat, but there is an infection in the beats that causes them to trip and tumble, lending a sickly stumble to the rhythms.
A dark-hop breakdown summons “Foreverneverendeverend,” a looping drone of synthetic noises that moves like a squall line on the horizon. Thunder rhythms ebb and flow within the dark veil of clouds. A human spirit haunts “She Elven,” where a woman’s voice floats in the mix, wordlessly calling to us through a miasma of industrial exhaust; while “Nowhere Everywhere” rises with the break of day, a delicate thermal updraft that starts to uncurl heretofore frozen melodies into faint streams.
Objekt4’s dark ambience further texturizes the shades of grey that exist between the terror of complete darkness and the new age ephemera of daylight. Her Face Among The Shadows is a walk in the gloom, but there are breaks of sunlight.
Her Face Among The Shadows is out now on Ravenheart.
